The Happiness and Pain of Moving to a New Stage in Life

The back window glass of my car doesn’t move up or down. It is stuck in the middle. I can’t take my car out. It is raining heavily. The rain will lash on everyone at the back. My mom wants to come with me for a marriage, and needs to sit where the rain will have its fury. I am clueless, and keep ringing people up. Finally manages to catch hold of my younger brother who lets me have his car, a less comfortable version of the Tatas.

Lini, the youngest daughter of one of my father’s cousins, will walk into a new stage in her life today, a life with another man. In the church, she looked like a queen, smiled when I approached her and shook her hand.

We all gently move from one stage to another and often don’t realise until we reach a new stage. During your younger days the movement is slow but as we grow older, we begin to experience it as a hard reality.

The young school days, when studies were the only worry, if you or your parents ever worried about them. Future never worried you, but you wanted to grow older. When your teens were over, as an adult proving oneself, creating a spot on this vast earth seemed to be the hardest task. You always thought, almost everybody else was better.

The older twenties of joblessness and jobs, low self esteem and high ambitions, but you grew, hardly realising, it was a moving reality. Early marriage days, when money hardly came. Sometimes you thought you might falter and fail, but never wanted to admit it to anyone. Late thirties, anchoring into a steady, may be a financial successful life, when more fat settled into your body. You had your kid, in the meanwhile, and your responsibilities and happiness, as the father of a daughter. Then one sad morning, your father died and the following days, looking at the empty divan where my father rested reading ‘Malayala Manorama’. The period, without a father. Now in the beginnings of forties, it is midlife blues. Sometimes, fear grips you at the thought of growing older.